MUSIC: Dan Masterson celebrates his new album at Thunder Road.

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Saturday

Feb 3, 2018 at 1:14 PMFeb 3, 2018 at 1:14 PM

When you interview a musician, it’s wise to get in the important questions right away. So when singer-songwriter-pianist Dan Masterson phoned from his home in Brighton to talk about his new album “When Reality Calls” and his upcoming show at Thunder Road in Somerville on Feb. 9, the first question was: “Are you related to Bat Masterson?” Silent for a moment, he replied, “Not that I know of.”

OK, with that disappointing answer out of the way, it was on to music.

Masterson, 27, a Walpole native, grew up with all sorts of music spinning around him. His mom, a country fan, would always be playing the Oak Ridge Boys and Garth Brooks. The Brooks album “Sevens,” which came out when was Masterson was 7, was the one “I first really dug into,” he said.

But by then he had already been singing in his elementary school choir and tinkering with a piano ... of sorts.

“My first instrument was this tiny Mickey Mouse light-up keyboard, an eight-key thing that came pre-loaded with ‘It’s a Small World’ and a couple of other songs,” said Masterson. “I started sort of playing along with the songs, and then figuring out my own songs on it. Piano lessons started in the second or third grade.”

But before he entered the pop-rock-ballad modes that he’s doing these days with his band, there was the world of orchestral music to explore.

“I started with orchestra, playing cello, toward the end of elementary school and into middle school,” he said. “My parents didn’t tell me this story till much later, but they somehow managed to brainwash me with [cellist] Yo-Yo Ma recordings while I was an infant. And when I went in to pick an instrument in elementary school, I said, ‘Wow! the cello sounds so good! I have to choose the cello.’

“I got interested in writing and arranging, and I started writing my own pieces for orchestra, but they weren’t very good because I didn’t have the training or understanding to do that,” he added. “So as I started high school, I started writing music, and more and more I was writing lyrics. I’ve been writing pretty steadily since then.”

In his college days, there were both solo piano gigs, as well as working with bands whenever he had the opportunity. Post-college, Masterson went about meeting more musicians and trying to learn the landscape of the Boston music scene, recording a couple of EPs, playing more gigs, building up a following, and sculpting his smooth falsetto into shape.

His first full length album, “When Reality Calls,” covers the gamut that runs from deeply personal songs to tunes with more than a hint of a political message. It also ranges from laid-back sounds to rockers. And it comes across as a much bigger production than the EPs.

“I’ve always been interested in having more action on stage, and I’ve always thought that my ultimate touring package would be a five-piece group,” he said. “So I wanted to represent a bit of that on this album. I realized that the majority of music out right now that’s in a similar style to what I’m doing is not stripped down, bare-bones, piano-drums-bass with maybe a hint of guitar. And the vocals on the earlier EPs didn’t have tons of harmonies. But I always felt that that should be more a part of the sound on the album.”

On the personal side, there’s “Unsteady” and “Too Much Time Alone.”

“A lot of my songwriting starts with a sort of autobiographical sense, and a lot of the times I twist it and fictionalize it,” he said. “But usually that’s the songwriter in me saying, ‘Maybe there’s an experience that I haven’t had exactly, but it’s specific and relatable and it captures something I’m feeling at any given time.’ So those two songs are personal to me.”

Then there’s the driving “Fight for It,” which doesn’t exactly hide Masterson’s views of the current resident of the White House (he doesn’t reveal who he voted for, but the song would suggest it wasn’t anyone named Trump).

“That was the last song written for the album,” he said, “and it was sort of the reckoning moment, after the election had happened, and everybody was trying to figure out what to write about. There’s definitely a little bit of politics on that one.”

Masterson is planning to do all of those songs at the Thunder Road show, at which he’ll be accompanied by Matt Silva on bass and vocals, Garrett Jones on guitar and vocals, and drummer Blaize Collard.

“We’re definitely playing nine of the songs on the album, not in order, though,” he said. “We’ll also throw in a couple of my older tunes, and we usually try to include at least one cover in our live sets, but we haven’t decided on this show yet.”